We can transform any space or surface into a display using electronic devices combined with location-based technologies, sensors, augmented reality and innovative visual surfaces. Furthermore, interactive surfaces are transforming the world, people and their activities.
It is progressively more possible – and accessible – to “write on the world“, layering contents, meanings, visuals and sensations that anyone can compose, diffuse and communicate.
The world transforms into a cross-medial polyphony built from ubiquitously accessible points of view: augmented reality, QRCodes, spime, fiducial markers, wearable technologies, portable electronic devices allow accessing content and information, and interacting with them directly from places, architectures, objects and bodies.
All this brings the word “publishing” into a totally new perspective, deeply mutating all of the roles involved: editors, authors, audiences, critics, curators. Roles that remix just as the visions and the contents, mutually interconnecting and overwriting each other, creating multiple and fluid visions of the world whose adoption can be a key element to the creation of new forms of expression, new sensibilities, new spaces.
The availability of ways to effectively stratify interpretations on the world in autonomous and incontrollable modalities gives rise to infinite possibilities for self-expression, self-determination and for the creation of sustainable opportunities which we have a chance to catch. Doing it effectively is a linguistic act and a cultural process which we can only activate through the emergence of imaginaries that allow for creation of these autonomous realities, their integration in the flow of our daily lives and the escape from those “walled gardens”, dead ends and mouse-traps that constantly sit around the corners of technological adoption.
During the workshop we will present these concepts throughout the disciplines and practices of art design and communication sciences, of digital and visual cultures, of hacking and activism.
Theory will go side by side with practice: we will introduce our newly developed Open Source platform that will be released by november under a GPL2 license, through which any WordPress blog can be transformed into a multichannel publishing system with cross-medial features (web, mobile, paper, augmented reality, location based, digital book…).
We will then show, in practice and getting people involved, how it is possible to use the platform to create a cross-medial publication that is accessible geographically, in proximity, architecturally, from objects “filled” with content and information, in augmented reality, from mobile phones, tablets and computers, and also from paper publications.
For anyone attending: please bring your laptop. The workshop will be useful even if you don’t bring your laptop with you, but you’ll have a chance to create your own example publication if you do bring it.